The Web’s Failed Hunt for the Boston Bomber

The Internet failed to find the Boston bombers, despite its sincerest efforts. First, it failed to identify the correct individuals in photos, initially focussing on people that it deemed suspicious-looking, like “Blue Robe Guy” and a high-school track athlete with brown skin who soon found himself on the cover of the New York Post. Then, after the F.B.I. released the correct photos of the two suspects—and pleaded with the public to only use those photos to I.D. them—it targeted Sunil Tripathi, a student at Brown University who’s been missing for nearly a month, along with Mike Mulugeta. These were the people, according to Reddit, in the F.B.I.’s photographs, not the brothers Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

Fuelled by erroneous reports that the Boston Police Department scanner dropped his name—a chain of events spectacularly recounted by Alexis Madrigal—it failed rather spectacularly in the case of Sunil Tripathi. Not only did it unleash a torrent of what one Redditor characterized as “highly offensive messages” on a Facebook page called “Help Us Find Sunil Tripathi,” which was briefly taken down before reappearing with a post about the “tremendous and painful amount of attention… cast on our beloved Sunil Tripathi in the past twelve hours,” it prompted a round of celebration that Reddit had named Tripathi before the B.P.D. Though much of it has been deleted from Reddit, references to a “smug celebration” remain. Currently, one of the top posts in the subreddit /r/findbostonbombers—which has removed any links accusing Tripathi of being the bomber—is a post from a Reddit moderator that “extend[s] deepest apologies to the family of Sunil Tripathi for any part we may have had in relaying what has turned out to be faulty information.”

The hive mind is perhaps most perfectly embodied by Reddit, which, besides claiming to be “the front page of the Internet,” is structured in a way to produce something that most approximates a swarm. (Reddit is owned by Advance Publications, the corporate parent of Condé Nast, publisher of The New Yorker.) It is organized into a community, or a series of communities, that lend themselves to intense focus on a single task or topic, with the labor divided among a multitude of workers. Through Reddit’s comment system, in which comments can be upvoted or downvoted—some comments rise while others get buried—and karma system, which “reflects how much good the user has done for the Reddit community,” an amorphous kind of thought leadership emerges. Ideas are distilled, focussed, and amplified. Twitter, the preëminent social medium for broadcasting and sharing news and information, by contrast, is a largely unorganized group of individuals coming to the same place. Though there is, or can be, a loosely shared sense of common ground or purpose—say, broadcasting news—the more decentralized nature of Twitter and the continuous stream resists the erection of a rigid structure of directed, divided labor focussed on a single issue. There is little grouping of data or information beyond hashtags, which are themselves organized as unending streams. And it does not rank items in the stream; further amplification of a post, through retweets, is its own ranking.

Yet, as badly as the Internet failed in the production of genuinely new and accurate real-world information, the massively distributed labor force of the Internet swarm does some things extremely well. There may have been no more gripping place to watch the events of last night unfold than in threads like this one on Reddit, or crowd-sourced maps like this one, producing single, dense narratives from a million disparate parts. And it is extremely effective at excavating digital trails, which appear to have been left behind by the suspects: an Amazon wish list, potential YouTube account and Twitter account for the suspects have emerged. The full force of a stirred swarm is on display at the suspected Twitter account of Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, based on a past profile picture; the account, registered with the name Jahar, is now at the center of a Twitter storm. Some are retweeting posts that now seem eerie—on April 15th, the account tweeted, “Ain’t no love in the heart of the city, stay safe people”—while others plead for the suspect to turn himself in; still more messages are simply insults. And the number of them appears to be accelerating.

There has long been hope that, given the state of the Internet and the tools we have now versus even a few years ago and, to a lesser extent, the current distrust of the government and related officials, the hive mind would evolve to a state where it could produce the kind of intelligence that would lead to a breakthrough ahead of the police. But it is still suited to a very particular set of tasks that can be solved by directed, yet highly distributed, parallel processing, whose proper functioning is predicated on having good information to process.

Thus, a cycle is born, in which part of the media’s new role is to gather and verify information that now originates outside of traditional channels: information is synthesized and produced by the hive mind; the media contextualizes and verifies it; the hive mind then digests and synthesizes that new, verified information, producing even more new information based on that; and this repeats, endlessly. Eventually, a highly refined product emerges. But the process is messy, and now more visible than ever. Unfortunately, as we saw last night, it can sometimes lead to terrible things. But there is no going back.